Richard Spencer is one of the Daily Telegraph's Middle East correspondents. Married with three children, he was previously news editor, and then China correspondent for six years. He is based in Cairo.

Drinks party without drinks

The annual Foreign Ministry New Year drinks do for its friendly horde of resident hacks was not without its unusual aspects this year.

China's missile:Â continues to beÂ a heated topic

It was held on Friday at the Beijing Urban Planning Exhibition Hall, a must-see place for visitors by the way, both for the vision of Beijing present and future and for its film shows (including a 3-D one) on how it got where it is. (Not absolutely everything is told, of course, but that's for a different day).

One unusual aspect was the fact that you are not actually allowed to take drinks or food into the main level of the exhibition centre, so for the most party it was a drinks party without any drinks. This is hard for a hack to comprehend, of course, but in some ways it made everything easier.

Fumbling with your business card with a glass of red wine in one hand is always an accident waiting to happen, in my experience, and of course, apart from gossiping, fumbling for business cards is the main purpose of these events.

The second unusual aspect was that as of January 1, the reporting restrictions which said we were breaking the law every time we left Beijing or interviewed someone without Foreign Ministry permission and minders have been lifted.

This meant that there was a lot of mutual backslapping going on, rather than the usual slightly cagey conversations about what we had been up to and, of course, how journalists shouldn't criticise China even if it tried to stop them doing their job.

There have been a couple of cases where the new rules have been called in already: see my Economist colleague's account of his experiences in one of China's "Aids" villages. (The odd link is because the magazine itself is behind a paywall.)

However, what really made the evening go with a bang was the fate of a conked out Chinese weather satellite, which was blown up by a ground-based missile, at least according to the Pentagon.

The news came out long after we had all gone to bed on Thursday, and on Friday, when we tried to get comments from the Ministries of Defence and Foreign Affairs, there came none. Phones rang out or switched to answerphone, or were just engaged. One official blustered about it all being made up – not really convincingly.

So poor old Liu Jianchao, the foreign ministry's chief spokesman, was a sitting duck when he arrived for his evening's mixer. Surrounded constantly by throngs of journalists desperate to get the official quote, he didn't even have any line to give.

Even now, the Chinese have refused to put out a statement confirming or denying the report.

He took it in good spirit, and gave us an emphatic restatement of China's formal opposition to an arms race in space without the slightest sign of defensiveness (I've pointed out before that the Oxford-educated Liu is a benign High Court judge of a spokesman, which not all such are).

His hounding pushed the Peking Opera that had been laid on for us into second place.

As for the meaning of what he said, I don't really buy the line put out by the United States today that the military could have done this without the people at the top knowing, nice though it might be to think that the "leaders" are decent people "we can do business with" and it's just the PLA that has the odd hawkish general.

Hu Jintao, after all, is head of the military commission, and the army definitively answers to the Party. Would they really launch something like this without telling him?

I think it's highly possible that the foreign ministry genuinely weren't informed, as Liu said: I don't believe his "no comment, but here's the standard line" response to questioning was a carefully veiled putting of the ball into America's court (because of its refusal to take part in a moratorium on space weapons).

There are better ways of getting that message out, and really, we should not forget that the foreign ministry is really rather unimportant in the general hierarchy of things. The foreign minister isn't in the politburo (unlike the defence minister).

As for the general purpose of the test: of course, it was aimed to some extent at the extraordinary American policy document last year which stated baldly that while the Pentagon was allowed to proceed with weaponising space, no-one else was.

But it's important to be careful about what a moratorium on space weaponry might mean.

There's a big difference between space weapons as understood in this context – which means firing missiles from satellites, or more likely using satellite-based lasers or satellite-launched "sat-mines" to knock out your opponents' satellites, and the use of satellites for other military purposes; and also compared to using ground-based missiles to knock out satellites.

It makes sense that China (and Russia) want a moratorium on the first category, because they are so far behind in this area. (And predictable that the US wouldn't agree to one, because they are so far ahead).

It seems to me that a moratorium on satellites used for all military purposes is out of the question – satellites are now basic equipment for spying on your enemies, directing missiles, etc.

And given that is so, and also that the US is pretty far ahead in this area too, it makes sense for the Chinese to threaten to use ground-based missiles to knock them out. Why wouldn't it?

I'm sure the Chinese would like to do a deal that got the Americans to withdraw the missile defence system (using satellites to enable anti-missile missiles to hit their targets).

But I don't think the Americans are going to give in on that one, either.

And given how easy it is, apparently, to turn an ordinary missile into a satellite missile, giving up MDS development for some pledge (or what?) by the Chinese not to blow up any more of their defunct satellites doesn't strike me as something the Americans would see as a fair exchange.

So while I'm sure the Chinese would like to use their technical capability in this area as a means of negotiating some concession, I'm not sure they know what, and I'm pretty sure both that they won't get anywhere and that they know they won't get anywhere.

So why did they knock out this satellite? I think the simplest reasons are best: to make sure they could, and to make sure everyone knew they could. Is any other explanation necessary?